Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm splurged $125K on taxpayer-funded EV road trip, with staff blowing through per diem: watchdog (only 6.06 years left)

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Posted on 01/10/2025 2:23:20 PM PST by Libloather

Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm dropped nearly $125,000 in taxpayer money on pricey hotels and other expenses during her electric vehicle-boosting summer 2023 road trip — flanked by a gas-guzzling car — while her staff improperly exceeded their daily, federally determined allowances, according to the department’s watchdog.

Granholm’s team submitted 42 travel vouchers worth $124,824 for the taxpayer-funded tour — but 36 of the them had lodging costs valued over the government’s per diem rates to the tune of $9,487.50, the watchdog found.

Some of the travelers also received higher reimbursement amounts than they were supposed to and several travel reports had inaccurate information in them, prompting House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) to seize on the report as proof of “serious waste, fraud, and abuse.”

The inflated costs were also a direct result of the Energy Department’s chosen method of travel. There had been cheaper hotels usually within a mile or so, but Granholm’s group decided to book rooms near EV charging stations.

“Travelers could have chosen different nearby hotels to reduce travel costs at the Government’s expense; however, Department officials mentioned difficulties finding hotels with functioning EV chargers on site or nearby,” the watchdog’s report noted.

The difficulty finding the charging stations is a result of what one Democratic senator called the Biden administration’s “pathetic” progress on a $5 billion program to expand EV charging depots nationwide beginning in 2021.

As of the start of 2024, only seven had been built.

“That is pathetic. We’re now three years into this … That is a vast administrative failure,” Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) said last June. “Something is terribly wrong and it needs to be fixed.”

(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...

A small outing before being locked up.

1 posted on 01/10/2025 2:23:20 PM PST by Libloather

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